Thick smoke smelling of ozone and scorched concrete billowed through the air, enveloping the Ruin Zone that now resembled a small hell. Amid the sweltering heat that roasted the lungs, Nabiel coughed softly. With the last strength flowing through his screaming muscles, the young man forced himself to stand. His oversized white shirt was now dirty with dust and bloodstains.
Seeing his prey still able to stand, Dabi lowered his hands. The raging blue flames that had been rampaging suddenly subsided, leaving embers licking at the air around them.
"Hey, why aren't you using your Quirk?" Dabi said, stopping his fire shots and looking at Nabiel calmly. His sadistic expression was replaced by condescending curiosity. "Are you underestimating me?"
Nabiel let out a long sigh and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. He wiped the blood from his cracked lips.
"Damn…" Nabiel muttered in a lazy tone that sounded in stark contrast to the deadly situation around him. "And I had just recovered from a fever."
The young man twisted his wrist, pointing the tip of his remaining tactical knife straight at Dabi. His gaze was flat, without a trace of fear. "I do not need a Quirk to defeat someone like you. And my Quirk is very difficult to use."
Dabi fell silent for a moment before his laughter exploded. A dry laugh echoed among the debris, full of mockery. "Hahaha! You're so arrogant, little rat!"
Without warning, Dabi dashed forward with terrifying speed. Both hands spread wide, emitting blinding blue fire, ready to turn anything it touched into ash.
Nabiel's survival instinct screamed. He immediately spun his body, trying to run from the attack's path. With the reflex speed he had honed, his hand grabbed a large concrete boulder from the nearby ruins, lifting it as a shield just as Dabi arrived in front of him.
BAM!
Dabi's punch slammed into the rock. However, it was not just a physical blow. The extreme heat from the blue fire instantly crushed the thick concrete boulder as if it were made of crackers. Not only that, the heat wave radiated and burst through the defense, striking directly at both of Nabiel's wrists that were trying to hold it back.
The unreasonable temperature burned his skin in seconds.
"Got you," Dabi said in a low, threatening voice. The man broke through the melting rock fragments and immediately gripped both of Nabiel's arms tightly.
The blue fire blazed even more fiercely, spreading from Dabi's palms to Nabiel's skin. The excruciating pain stung his human nerves. With the last of his strength and body flexibility, Nabiel maneuvered a twist, kicked Dabi in the chest to break free, and leaped backward.
Nabiel landed with ragged breathing. He looked down at both wrists, now blistered, burned, and blackened. His tactical knife had fallen somewhere, melted along with the dust. The long sleeves of his white shirt were now singed at the ends, sticking to his burn wounds.
"Now you can't use your hands anymore, right?" Dabi's smile widened, horrific and full of triumph. He stepped forward slowly. "Come on, use your Quirk."
Nabiel fell silent. He slowly stood upright, letting his burned hands hang limply at his sides. A strong wind that came from nowhere suddenly blew across the area, making the remnants of his long shirt sleeves flutter wildly.
Nabiel's position was now directly under the shadow of a towering ruined building. His figure was darkened by the shadow, hiding part of his face. However, from within that darkness a small smile was etched on his lips. A smile that did not belong at all to a high school student who was cornered.
"All right…" Nabiel's voice sounded different. His laziness vanished, replaced by absolute calm that froze the blood. "If you insist."
Nabiel shifted his feet. He assumed a strange fighting stance, shifting his weight onto one point and lifting one leg. Only his legs. Both hands were left relaxed behind his back.
"I will show you my troublesome Quirk."
***
Several minutes passed, and the Ruin Zone had turned into a dance arena of death. The battle continued with terrifying intensity.
Explosion after explosion of blue fire destroyed the remaining buildings, yet Dabi could not land a single fatal blow. The young man in front of him fought only with a pair of legs, without using his burned hands at all.
Nabiel moved with fluidity that surpassed the normal limits of human anatomy. He avoided fire pillars with acrobatic body spins, used walls to leap, and countered with deadly kicks targeting Dabi's blind spots. Every movement was calculated with mathematical precision.
There were no signs of a Quirk being activated. No physical changes, no manipulated elements. But Dabi felt something was wrong. Very wrong.
Every time Nabiel's deep black eyes looked at him, Dabi felt exposed. The young man's gaze felt… analyzing. Not analyzing his movements as a fighter, but analyzing his existence as a concept.
Dabi unleashed a wide horizontal fire sweep. Suddenly his vision lost sight of Nabiel.
"Hey."
A soft whisper sounded right beside Dabi's ear. The man startled, reflexively spinning and swinging a fiery punch toward the voice.
But his fist only hit empty air.
Dabi looked up with labored breathing. Nabiel was now standing calmly on the concrete edge of a nearly collapsing building, looking down like a king gazing at a pawn on a chessboard.
"Why?" Nabiel's voice flowed calmly across the distance between them. "Your fire is not as hot as before. Is… your body not strong enough to contain that heat?"
Dabi's eyes widened. His jaw tightened. He growled in anger, focusing fire on the soles of both feet and shot into the air with a propulsion explosion. "Shut your mouth! You damn aspiring hero!"
Dabi fired massive fire projectiles in succession. Nabiel dodged once more, leaping from one piece of debris to another in the air, looking at Dabi with a flat, calm, and mocking gaze.
"Makes sense, does it not?" Nabiel said, his voice somehow clear amid the roar of fire. "Those burn wounds on your body. Your skin does not have resistance equal to the destructive power of your Quirk. It must sting every time you release fire."
That sentence pierced Dabi's mental defenses. The man was now completely furious. His pride, the secret of his weakness, was exposed so easily by a kid with provocative words that struck straight to his heart.
"DIE YOUUUUUU!"
Dabi roared. He released his limits. Ignoring the pain burning his own flesh, he unleashed blue fire so massive it radiated from every pore of his body like an exploding star. The fire surged toward Nabiel in the form of an unavoidable tsunami wave.
Nabiel did not panic. He simply leaped into the air, letting himself float above the sea of blue fire ready to swallow him.
It was at that moment that reality began to warp.
"I had already predicted all of this, and the result is already clearly certain…"
For a moment time seemed to stop. The fierce blue flames froze in the air. The floating dust stopped spinning. The laws of physics in this world momentarily bowed to a higher existence. Nabiel's Outer consciousness touched the surface of the narrative.
"…It is…."
Nabiel stared straight at Dabi, who was frozen in his rage.
"TRUE."
Nabiel's voice was not loud, yet it echoed in the mind, in the air, and in the fabric of reality itself. An absolute declaration.
"Dabi, or whoever you are. Your body is very weak to that fire itself."
Instantly the atmosphere around Nabiel shattered. The young man's body emitted a thick and horrifying black aura, a visual distortion that made the space around him appear cracked. His eyes, previously deep black, now became completely pitch black without limits, with shining white pupils staring directly into the soul of the world.
He did not change Dabi's physical form. He did not extinguish the fire. Nabiel simply took a hidden fact, validated it within the narrative system, and forced that truth to overwrite reality instantly.
"Witness it," Nabiel's voice echoed, overlapping with cosmic resonance. "The Quirk I just created."
[Quirk: True>